New MDC template: tagged sub-pages

Sheppy whipped up a nice little MDC template that enables you to generate a list of sub-pages that have a particular tag. The template is called “taggedsubpages”.

As an example of how it works, in my user area of MDC I am working on a new Thunderbird tutorial. It consists of several pages, named “Multi-page_1″, “Multi-page_2″, etc. It would be handy to have a quick list of the pages related to the tutorial, a list that is automatically updated when I add or delete pages. However, the tutorial pages are stored on the same hierarchical level as many other unrelated pages, which means the {{wiki.tree(”path to root”)}} Deki Wiki template is not useful.

To make use of Sheppy’s new MDC template, I simply add a tag (I used “new_tutorial”) to all the pages related to my tutorial. Then I specify the taggedsubpages template with my tag as an argument, like this:

{{Template.taggedsubpages("new_tutorial")}}

This gives me a bullet list of each of the sub-pages that have the “new_tutorial” tag.

This template is particularly useful because I think that one of the usability shortcomings of MDC is the fairly flat page hierarchy. Because we don’t have much structure, pages often lack the context that is provided, for example, by a breadcrumb path. The taggedsubpages template is a good tool both for working within a more structured hierarchy (as we move in that direction) and for dealing with the current lack of page hierarchy.